This post has been slowly taking shape in my head since last year’s ISA in Toronto. A year late, I know, but maybe now it can act as some kind of refresher as we head into this year’s festivities. (In fact, as I write these words with a cup of tea in front of me, I’m watching the last of the sunrise over Faubourg-Marigny.)

Last year, as there has been for a few years now, there was a roundtable that consisted of people telling stories – personal stories, political stories, literary stories. The room was packed, as it always is for the storytelling roundtable. People stood leaning against the walls, cross-legged on the floor, and sometimes two to a seat. The air was warm and still. The stories were touching, wryly acerbic, and occasionally silly. One storyteller, though, both caught and divided the audience’s attention. She told a powerful story…

I know that I’m not supposed to say this. I know that as a good little third-wave feminist I’m supposed to sweetly explain to you how much I love and value men. I’m supposed to trot out my husband of nearly five years, my son, all of my male friends and relatives and display them as a sort of badge of honour, proof that I am not a man-hater. I’m supposed to hold out my own open palms, prove to you how harmless I am, how nice I am. Above all, I’m supposed to butter you up, you men, stroke your egos, tell you how very important you are in the fight for equality. This is the right way to go about it, or so I’ve been told. As my mother would say, you catch more flies with honey.

Being a black man over the past couple of weeks has been interesting, as it always is. I’ve stood in solidarity with the citizens of Ferguson, Missouri – both virtually and in a march at Notting Hill Carnival. There is a long history of black women leading movements for change and the most inspiring occurrence to come out of the recent protests has been the support black men have received from black women. However with that, it revealed a harsh reality, we aren’t always there for black women.

Earlier this year, NFL and former Baltimore Ravens running back (fired yesterday) Ray Rice was indicted for assaulting his then fiancée Janay Palmer. On Sunday, TMZ leaked a video recording (without consent) of the assault taking place in an elevator at an Atlantic City casino. The recording shows Palmer and Rice having an altercation, which leads to the latter…

In expat-aidland, you save Africa during and week and get absolutely wasted in the weekend. Now, I do like a good party myself. I was going to say “but there are boundaries” (and I know this is Dunglish), which is exactly the point: there aren’t.

Navigating ‘the expat scene’ feels like being back in high school, yet worse. Getting drunk is a way of life (not only during the weekends, by the way), using cocaine is as normal as eating peanuts and sleeping around is the new religion. People behave as if they are in some sort of eternal puberty, and no one condemns it: everybody is part of it and in expat-aidland, there are no rules (except for those liberal values and ideas we impose upon ‘the locals’ through our own development programmes, of course).

This micro-cosmos of mostly white people living it up under dire conditions has of…

Comments are closed on this post over at Aid Watch (a great blog which has also closed). I commented on the post, and another reader left an interesting comment in response to me that I’d like to respond to. But since I can’t, I’ll just write it here, after a little background on the post itself.

Professor and economist William Easterly of NYU (author of TheTyranny of Experts) said of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue in 2011, “Treating women as sex objects transgresses the moral obligation to respect the rights of women.”

I said in a comment, “… I get harassed and talked down to all the time and it seems to me that it’s to do with a general attitude that doesn’t take women seriously or doesn’t value women as equals. Those people’s perceptions of ‘hot’ women in bathing suits will be different than those who are respectful of women but still look at a swimsuit cover and think damn, she’s hot.”

In other words, you can be misogynist and think she’s hot at the same time, but your perception of her (and her “hotness”) will be very different from that of a totally normal, respectful dude that also thinks she’s hot. That’s what I meant by that.

Another commenter, Brett, said, in response to me, “That’s what I find weak about Easterly’s claim. He’s basically saying that appreciating the hotness of a model on the cover of a magazine somehow inclines men to treat all women disrespectfully, and that doesn’t really follow. It’s quite possible for men to appreciate the hotness of a model and realize that that’s not exactly the everyday standard of beauty, and that you shouldn’t treat women solely by their appearances.” [emphases in original]

I really want to respond to this comment. First of all: “… you shouldn’t treat women solely by their appearances” is hardly something to stand up and applaud for. It’s the bare minimum of decency. And I should hope that sentiment goes for the rest of humankind, not just women.

But what really doesn’t sit well with me is when he says that Easterly is “basically saying that appreciating the hotness of a model on the cover of a magazine somehow inclines men to treat all women disrespectfully…”

This statement inadvertently makes the assumption that “appreciating hotness” is the same as, or tantamount to, “treating disrespectfully.” It implies that, well, of course we’re disrespecting and objectifying the models on the cover of Sports Illustrated when we ogle them. (Or in other magazines, or porn, or department store advertisements, etc.) That doesn’t mean we disrespect all women that way.

But Sports Illustrated models also deserve respect as human beings.

Renoir, “The Bathers” (est. 1918; PD-1923). Just to reiterate that “beauty” is socially constructed; assuming Renoir found these women beautiful.

Being physically attracted to someone is not the same thing as disrespecting or objectifying that person (is that really such a hard distinction to make?), and “hotness” is relative; men in the US generally have a much more diverse sense of what “beautiful” is than our media culture would have you believe.

Another problem SI has is that the corollary of only featuring women on the covers of swimsuit issues is an assumption that only hetero men (and, maybe, LBTQ women, though I doubt SI execs think of them as a market) are interested in sports. I think this is a gross miscalculation. Maybe the next SI swimsuit issue should feature 18 – 21 year old boys, in skimpy swimsuits and revealing Speedo briefs, with svelte abs and flawless skin and soft sultry eyes and impossible physiques, and in poses as homoerotic as the cover of this last one. It would be a nod to their hetero female readership, who are interested in sports but also enjoy a little eye candy every so often.

But that is a childish reaction on my part. I know that constraining beauty standards for men, putting pressure on them, and sexualizing them in similarly harsh ways is not the way to move forward. And that doing something like that may serve to make many male SI readers — the homophobic ones, anyway — even more uncomfortable than they already are with their own sexuality (although maybe that would be a good thing). I’m aware that there are a host of problems with this idea.

But, really. (I mean really?) We are like a nation of teenagers who still haven’t figured out how to tell the difference between sex and love, or between attraction and disrespect. Maybe turning the tables once in a while will make the absurdity become a little more visible and help us us figure it out.